Nokia may still be the number one cell phone vendor in the world, but that's far from the case in the U.S. The carrier simply hasn't landed many handsets in carrier stores, and buying them unlocked is very expensive up front. The Nokia C3 is a welcome exception. It's an AT&T prepaid phone available exclusively at Wal-Mart for just $69. The C3 looks a lot like one of the company's higher-end smartphones up front, but it's really a basic texting phone in disguise. Unfortunately, it's also not very good. You can do better for similar money.

Design and Call Quality
Let's start with the basics. The C3 measures 4.5 by 2.3 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs four ounces. It's available in a pleasing slate blue color with silver accents. It's made mostly of matte plastic, but the aluminum battery cover gives it a touch of class, as that's the part you're holding most often. The 2.4-inch, non-touch LCD offers 320-by-240-pixel resolution. It looks bright and colorful, and the UI responds quickly to the five-way control pad and six function keys.

The four row QWERTY keyboard features large, silent keys. They're a bit stiff, though. And the spacebar just felt weird; each time I pressed it, I felt multiple clicks underneath the plastic. Dialing numbers also felt cramped, mainly because Nokia centers the numeric keys and puts the zero to the right of the nine key; this is easy to get used to, though.

The Nokia C3 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) phone with no 3G or Wi-Fi. Voice quality was just so-so. Callers sounded thin, tinny, and even harsh at higher volumes, and there wasn't enough gain available for loud environments. The microphone was better; callers said they didn't hear anything terribly wrong, although it was clear to them I was on a cell phone. Reception was fine. Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. There was no voice dialing of any kind, which is a problem for anyone behind the wheel of a car. The speakerphone sounded smooth and static free, but it didn't go loud enough for outdoor use. Battery life was amazing, and set a PCMag record at 17 hours and 54 minutes of continuous talk time.

User Interface and Apps
As a prepaid phone, there are no GPS navigation or other fancy media features. But you do get some basic messaging apps, including e-mail, IM, and Social Net, which hooks into Facebook and Twitter accounts. The WebKit browser does a good job rendering pages, though controlling the on-screen cursor is a little fiddly. There are also some basic games available.

The Symbian Series 40 OS is quite dated, but for a low-end phone like this, it's more than up to the task. The unlock sequence was a little weird; the phone displays a numeric keypad showing you which two keys to press, but the phone doesn't have a numeric keypad, and the "function" key is unlabeled. (It's the bottom leftmost key, with a graphic of an arrow pointing to the top right).

The phone can access Nokia's confusing Ovi Store, which offers ringtones, wallpaper, and some basic apps. This isn't a smartphone, though; don't let the store icon confuse you. The apps available here are more basic and limited than you'll find on a smartphone.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
Nokia rates the side-mounted microSD slot for 8GB cards, but my 32GB SanDisk card worked fine. There's also 54MB of free internal memory. Music tracks sounded awful over Motorola S9-HD ($129, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones. The standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack was sadly buggy. When I tried a set of wired earbuds from a Nokia E5, I could only hear audio reliably in one channel, with plenty of static as I fiddled with the connector. This was not confidence inspiring, to say the least. There's a built-in FM radio for those quick bursts of NPR while commuting above ground, assuming you can find an earbud that works.

The 2-megapixel camera has no auto-focus or flash. The camera also seemed buggy; the phone randomly chose between saving photos in a readable JPG format and a non-readable, much larger "NRW" format. For the ones that worked, images looked sickly, with a green tint and a grainy texture that looked like artificial over-sharpening. Test 320-by-240-pixel videos played quite smoothly at 24 frames per second, but were a bit dim, soft, and pixelated thanks to a low bit-rate encoding.

The Nokia C3 is a good value for voice calls and basic messaging. That's it. If you're shopping for a prepaid AT&T texting phone, there are some better choices if you're not afraid of a refurbished model. They include the Pantech Impact ($89 refurbished, 4 stars), Pantech Pursuit ($79 refurbished, 3 stars), and Samsung Strive ($89 refurbished, 3 stars). All three are better texting phones than the Nokia C3, and are better deals as prepaid devices than they were as regular contract phones.

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Jamie Lendino is the Editor-In-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor In Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also appeared in the print editions of Popular Science, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision,...
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